Teaching

Spring 2018 Offers

1. Semester Office Hours

  • Monday: 12:30 am – 1:30 pm
  • In case of questions please come to my office, write me an email or dial my number.

2. CHEM7780 Scattering Methods in Soft Matter Science, tentatively: 202 Williams, Tuesday 1:30-4:30 pm

Plastics, batteries, water purification, energy storage, fuel cells, all of these materials are very important for our life. Over the most recent years, substantial progress in fundamental understanding was accomplished by means of scattering experiments.

LSU is one of a few universities in the world that operates its own Synchrotron, a very powerful X ray source that can be utilized to study materials by scattering instruments. At present, a new small-angle X ray scattering (SAXS) instrument is installed that can be used to characterize polymers and colloidal systems, like nanoparticles, micelles and microgels. SAXS is a perfect microscope to study objects with diameters in the range of 1 to 500 nm. Unlike a real microscope, SAXS requires the ability to read the data, a skill that will be introduced by this lecture.

The lecture will introduce the basics of scattering experiments, including the importance of various sources, and different setups. It will show how to prepare, conduct and analyze the experiments. The course includes a proposal writing tutorial and includes all the steps necessary to write a successful proposal to a large-scale federal facility, like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Then we will study materials by (dynamic) light scattering and by SAXS. These samples are either provided or own samples can be studied as well. Finally, a short report collects the information gathered from the experiments.

After the course the participants will:

  • know how to prepare scattering experiments, including collecting preliminary data necessary for proposal submission
  • be able to write successful proposals to synchrotrons and neutron sources
  • be able to conduct the experiment, analyze the data
  • be able to write a short experimental report that shows the success of the experiments (often required by large-scale facilities)

Course Coverage:

  1. A Very Short Introduction to Soft Matter
  2. Light-, X ray-, and neutron scattering: Sources, Basic Principles, and Survey of Different Instruments and Techniques
  3. Introduction into (Dynamic) Light Scattering ( DLS)includes: preparation and own DLS experiments, and introduction how to obtain preliminary data to justify a SAXS experiment
  4. Introduction into Small-Angle X Ray Scattering (SAXS)
  5. Proposal Writing Tutorial(or how to write a successful proposal = using preliminary data from (DLS))
  6. SAXS experiments at CAMD, the LSU Synchrotron
  7. Analysis of the SAXS collected at CAMD and Comparison to DLS

3. Group Seminars

Thursday, 5 – 7 pm